Safe
by trufflemores
Summary: Oliver prefers to be a little spoon. He likes feeling safe.


**_Helena is holding onto him and for the first time in five years, he almost sleeps through the night._**

Oliver can't guard his own back.

Evolution fails him, forcing him to improvise and trust other people. He can't afford to be too reclusive; he needs strong relationships to stay alive. But he also can't trust someone with a concealed knife, waiting to stab him once he turns around. Finding the happy medium is a grueling task: it requires many hours and countless false starts, wading through relationships that amount to nothing and watching deep friendships die with a bullet to the head.

By the time he escapes the island and the past five years, he's almost anesthetized to the stress of being constantly on guard. He doesn't think twice about it. He can't trust anyone that much.

Even when his mother assigns him a succession of bodyguards, he abandons them. _You've gotta keep up, Rob_ , he chides John's replacement as if he wouldn't run like hell if he saw Rob on the horizon. He doesn't want them near him; he needs space to evaluate his situation. He can't have a barrier in the way, and no matter how well-meaning, bodyguards stand between him and potential threats. He needs a clear sightline for a clean shot. Anything less can and will prove fatal.

Back home, he adjusts well to day-to-day life, but he still sleeps with his back to a wall, huddled in the tightest ball he can form, shaking and sweating through a restless night of sleep. On the island, he never slept long, and platitudes won't reset his acquired insomnia. Recovery is painstaking and gradual. He half-worries that his ability to sleep a full night may never return, that a trusting part of him has been irreparably damaged along the way. Twenty percent of his body is covered in scars; it seems only fitting that his psychological wounds would run as deep.

His relationship with John progresses, but things take a dark turn after Derek Reston dies protecting his son during a failed bank robbery.

Oliver _tries_ , harder than he wants to admit, to right the world around him. He wants to improve the lives of others. When he refuses to find justice for a downed SCPD cop because the Reston family isn't on The List, John accuses him of not being a hero. He's right, but not for the reason he thinks.

It's not that Oliver doesn't _want_ to be heroic. He _can't_ be that kind of hero. He's only capable of so much good; he only has so many hours in any given day, so much energy, so much heart. He can't save everyone. He doesn't dare try.

But John gets through to him, shows him the small picture, and it unravels him.

When Helena walks into his life, John's assessment is right – _you're like an addict trying to help himself by making another addict go straight_ – but Oliver doesn't see it that way.

No, Oliver sees her as a Slade, a Shado, a _Sara_. She's a wartime ally, someone who's been through hell and understands what it's like to still miss the days of solitude. She gets him.

John doesn't – not for lack of trying. The barrier is simple: John is too far from his own crucible to understand; he embraces recovery. Oliver embraces the old way, the fire that burns his hands, because it keeps him warm at night, it's what he knows, and it's what he almost loved, when everything else was falling apart.

There is a camaraderie to trusting someone suffering as much as he is. A kinship. A shared agony that feels like screaming into a void and knowing he isn't the only one whose lungs are exhausted at the end of the day.

He lets Helena in and she doesn't hurt him, not right away, and for the first time in a long time he sleeps with a warmth at his back he isn't used to. It's more intimate than sex. For them, sex is thoughtless; they're both out of their own heads, preoccupied and hurting. Sleeping with his back to her is the most vulnerable he has been with another human being since the Chinese fishing boat picked him up. He kind of falls in love with it. When she slips out of bed the next morning, he wakes immediately to the cold.

Reality breaks his heart a little.

 ** _He's feigning strength and falling asleep at the wheel, curled up in a corner of the cave John pretends not to inhabit, providing him that little mercy_**.

When Helena's life spirals out of his control, he listens to John and lets her go.

Listening to John proves to be the most fruitful decision of his career. More often than not, the man's intuition is spot-on: John _knows_ things. He knows when Oliver is lying to him, and he knows when Oliver is lying to himself. It's an admirable trait, a skill that makes him an invaluable teammate: when Oliver runs on fumes, John is the one to pull over, to set him down and tell him to catch his breath. He doesn't want to – his whole life is motion – but he doesn't have much choice in the matter.

When The Count nails him with a double-dose of Vertigo, Oliver only survives because John is right there, hauling him through it.

Lying on a sterile gray table, he awakes with a killer headache and a crushing fatigue that makes putting a hoodie on a difficult task. His hands don't want to cooperate; neither do his legs. His lungs burn. His ears ring. Every square inch of him aches. He wants to sleep, but he needs to act: he has to take down The Count before more people suffer. That's how it always is: rest is for the dead. The living are needed. The living must act, _now_ , or there will be more dead.

John doesn't see it that way. John sees living as an end in itself, something to cherish, but Oliver has spent five years learning to live simply because he is told. He has a mission. He must atone for his father's sins, or die trying.

When he staggers into the foundry late, well after they take down The Count, Oliver must make a sight. John lets him get ten steps before catching him around the shoulders and redirecting him to a corner of the foundry with a cot on it. It's not the most lavish accommodation, but it's better than a gray metal table, and Dig dug up a stack of blankets from somewhere and uses two as cushioning.

Oliver is so out of it he can't even lie down properly, fumbling for the edge of the cot and hitting the floor instead. Delirious, headachy, dosed up on way too much Vertigo and even more antidote, he's ready to sleep on the concrete. But John won't let him: he essentially picks Oliver up bridal-style before setting him down and wrapping him in one of the remaining blankets.

Barely conscious, Oliver watches John moves around the foundry, performing trivial maintenance that could easily be postponed. Oliver wants to tell him to go home, get some rest, but he can't speak. He listens, instead, to the familiar metallic grind of arrowheads being sharpened, the shuffle of bulky items being moved, the tap of keys on computers, even a cup of coffee being periodically picked up and set down again. He dozes, too sick to sleep but too tired to move, quietly relieved that John stays with him that night.

 ** _Felicity literally means "intense happiness," and Oliver understands why, because he has never loved falling asleep as much as he has loved falling asleep in her arms._**

It's years before he finds the comfort of John and the immediacy of Laurel, Sara, and Helena in a single person.

Her name is Felicity Smoak, and she has a red pen in her mouth the day that they meet, and he's been quietly in love with her since he visited the IT department. He loves her like the sun, watching her rise and set every day, unconsciously but intensely aware of her presence, somewhere in the world. He misses her when she's gone; he gravitates towards her when she's around. He doesn't realize how much he needed her until the days cloud over without her, and then he regrets that he didn't say it every day, _I love you, I love you, I love you_.

She lights his way, guiding him towards the right path when he flounders, when even John's counsel is insufficient to sway his opinion. She just _knows_ what to say. She always has.

And he trusts her.

With her, it's different than the others: it's the sex that is intensely intimate, and the way she hugs him after that feels familiar, like home. The first time, he's half-asleep and only fuzzily recalling that he's supposed to be the big spoon, here, some machismo concept of gender roles creeping into his subconscious, but before he can make a move, she koalas onto his back and he drifts off. He holds onto her arm, and she hugs him, and in days when they will climb down elevator shafts, he will hold her close like this, a feedback loop of promises:

 _I've got you._

He thinks it's a one-off thing and embraces the challenge of finally having someone else in his life, long-term, eager to please her. The next time they sleep together, he is more cognizant and tries to return the favor, cuddling her, but she finds it a little crowded, and he finds himself cold without her warmth at his back, struggling to sink into a deep sleep. After a while, they subconsciously course-correct, because he wakes up unexpectedly at four AM to find her snoring softly against his shoulder. He relaxes back into the most restful hour of sleep he gets that night.

She's five-foot-five and can't physically defend him from ninety percent of the perils that comprise his day-to-day, but he feels completely safe in her grip. Because it's not about her body-slamming the next bad guy to the floor for him or throwing an unweighted kitchen knife to save the day. It's about her role as Overwatch: literally watching over him, keeping him safe. Her entire role is to guard his blind spots and fly alongside him, processing what he processes from a distance, seeing the bigger picture.

Without trying, she reduces his anxiety, because he knows she's right there, and she is smart and vigilant and tough, and will do anything to keep him safe.

He loves that by the third time she just sort of latches onto his back, warm and cozy and pleasantly heavy, not nearly enough to crush him but enough to be immutably present, and he's flat on his stomach but he loves having her nearby. He rarely sleeps like this – only ever with other people; he's never slept flat on his stomach alone – but with her, he finds himself on his back, sprawled out, even occasionally on his back, exposing his soft underbelly to the world.

No harm befalls him. He knows it won't, and even though his body can't trust his mind yet, his soul trusts Felicity.

At the end of the day, exhausted, beaten to his core, and aching for reprieve, he sinks gratefully into her arms, be it on the couch or in bed. He rarely falls asleep at once – old habits die hard; he's lucky to get four hours a night – but he likes to lie there, steady and held. She runs her hands through his hair, down his back, nails sometimes scratching lightly. When they're on the couch, she breathes more slowly as she reads, and he likes the way her chest rises and falls more deeply underneath him. When they're in bed, she wraps her arms around his torso tightly and tosses a leg over both of his, a full-body embrace, and he couldn't feel safer.

He loves feeling safe.

 ** _He's rarely at his best, always fighting something, ailment or injury or otherwise, but with Felicity, he finds it doesn't matter where he starts: he finishes well._**

She's sleeping behind him, and he's close to it, but rubbing his thumb across the arm she has around his stomach, he sighs and holds onto the present, just for a little longer, because it's taken almost twelve years to get to here, married and in love and for this one night, at least, safe, but it's been worth every hour, every minute.


End file.
